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What is a marketplace? Essentially, a marketplace is a place where you can buy items that are produced or sold by other companies. Unless you are a specialty brand like Movado, Tommy Hilfiger, Louis Vuitton, etc., you are most likely selling “other companies goods” on your site. In a marketplace, these companies are called “sellers”.

The best marketplaces offer things like drop ship – where the order gets sent directly to the seller to fulfill to the customer – eliminating the need to house the products in a warehouse (or your basement). Amazon does this very well, hence the popularity of Amazon. I can basically create a web presence with little capital and sell all kinds of things from all over the world on Amazon. If you are a retailer with an existing web site, then Amazon is your absolute enemy. You need to do things faster, cheaper, and most of all more efficiently.

This brings us back to my last post about IBM Digital Commerce and Mirakl.

With IBM Digital Commerce and Order Management you get an easy to use eCommerce platform that scales and offers not only drop ship but the ability to have a call center and even a store associate application; all connected to the same back-end eCommerce platform. Bring in Mirakl and you get a best in breed Marketplace platform that gives you the flexibility to onboard sellers, monitor seller KPI’s, automatic price and inventory updates, and even curation for your sellers.

If you haven’t had a chance, watch this partner connect video where I introduce Marketplaces and how IBM Digital Commerce and Mirakl make a great team for a great platform to compete against Amazon.

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In this episode of Partner Connect I visit Mirakl and the IBM Digital Commerce and WebSphere Commerce v9 connector that quickly enables the launch of a marketplace. With the cross channel capabilities of IBM Digital Commerce and the quick on-boarding with the Mirakl platform, companies can get up and running with a marketplace very quickly.

I take a couple of minutes in this episode to explain marketplaces and how pretty much any company selling other brands merchandise is in essence a marketplace. This also goes for B2B companies that sell other B2B “widgets”. In all cases, Mirakl streamlines the process of getting those products into your eCommerce experience. With the additional benefits of IBM Digital Commerce with Order Management you also benefit from a true omni-channel platform where orders can be processed through a call center and even an in store associate.